Whatever It Takes

May and Jim Davidson spent sixty-eight years together sharing an unbreakable love of Maine and a relentless drive to do “whatever it takes” to find success and happiness. After falling in love as teenagers, they built their first house using twenty dollars worth of lumber and optimistically started creating the life of their dreams. However, they soon learned that optimism alone wouldn’t sustain them. They lobstered, fished, farmed sheep, started a lobster trap sawmill, and criss-crossed the country as long haul truckers. And when they eventually collapsed into debt and uncertainty while trying to raise thousands of chickens, they regrouped and fought their way out again by developing a unique gift product inspired by the sea. May Davidson’s story is a decades-long tapestry of adventure, brutally hard work, light-heartedness, and risk taking. It offers a wider view of Maine during the last half of the twentieth century, a shared history between the farmers, lobstermen, truckers, and entrepreneurs who have witnessed tremendous change in their lifetimes. It’s a familiar tale to every reader who is determined to live a rich life despite obstacles–a story of the hard work and moxie that’s required to pursue a happy life.

May Davidson was born in 1929 in Damariscotta, a charming fishing village located in midcoast Maine. In 1947, she graduated from Lincoln Academy, a private high school in the nearby town of Newcastle. She married her teenage sweetheart, James, a year later. Determined to stay in Maine, Davidson and her husband of sixty-eight years experimented with several entrepreneurial endeavors--from creating a lobster trap building facility to raising purebred sheep--before finding worldwide success with the design of the iconic Maine Buoy Bell. Today, she lives in Whitefield, Maine, and is known for her column in The Lincoln County News.